"You go into hospital for a knee operation or hip replacement and could get infected with bacteria that very few drugs can control," said Manos Perros, head of AstraZeneca's infection iMed. "In a world without antibiotics any minor surgery or small wound could be a death sentence."

Some 25,000 people die in Europe every year due to bugs' resistance to antibiotics, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Drug-resistant bacteria cost Europe €1.5bn annually in healthcare costs and lost productivity due to days spent in hospital.

Despite the looming crisis, drugmakers have been slow to develop new antibiotics. AstraZeneca and GSK are the only major companies that have stayed involved while others have been put off by the tricky science and unpromising commercial prospects (antibiotics are usually only taken for short periods of time). The pipeline of future antibiotics has been described by the World Health Organisation as "virtually dry".

To show it is serious about the new research collaboration – dubbed NewDrugs4BadBugs – GSK will contribute an experimental antibiotic that targets multi-drug resistant respiratory and skin infections including MRSA and is in Phase II development. Pending the results of ongoing work, AstraZeneca, for its part, plans to include a treatment for severe sepsis and septic shock, as well as a novel antibody in early stage development that targets a toxin released by Staphylococcus aureus. This is a bacterium that grows on skin and inside the nose and is usually benign – unless it gets to a wound.

The collaboration is jointly funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), Europe's largest public-private initiative, and the pharma industry. IMI will provide €109m while the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies involved have pledged to contribute assets worth €114.7m. Janssen, Sanofi and Basilea Pharmaceutica are also participating and will work alongside public research organisations and scientific experts, although at this stage only GSK and AstraZeneca will contribute experimental drugs.

Perros points out that a major problem holding back the development of new antibiotics is that patients who really need them cannot be tested on them. Normally, new medicines are tested on those that need them against older drugs, but in the case of antibiotics, they have to be tested on people for whom the old antibiotics still work – for anyone else, clinical trials could be a death sentence.